Giant Scale Printer

This giant printer was originally constructed by [Komponent/LAB] in 2006 to print some large-format banners for a festival, but has recently been pulled out of storage and updated for the Venture Cup competition. The system received a few mechanical and software updates and was also mounted on tripods in order to make it fully portable.

Instead of using stepper motors and encoders to directly control the print head as in a typical printer, the entire print axis is turned vertically and the relative lengths of two belts are varied (along with the constant downward pull of gravity) to precisely control movement across the plane. The software uses HPGL plotter files and is able to scale them to fit the available printing area.

Although there are some issues with the print head wobbling due to the rapid accelerations, any printed imperfections appear to be difficult to notice from more than a few feet away. Precision could be further increased by tweaking the software to compensate for such unwanted movements.

Although we can imagine many different applications for such a printer such as architectural or street art, some fine tuning would definitely be required at very large scales and to compensate for wind, etc if done outdoors.

Here are some pictures of the build and there is a short video of it in action after the jump.

16 thoughts on “Giant Scale Printer”

For large outdoor paintings printhead could be equipped with accelerometer. It would give printer information about vibrations, with clever programming printer would be able to print when printhead would be near required position.

Maybe adding a third and even a fourth belt? Offset from the other two. And increasing the tension somewhat. The printer would then be fixed, much steadier, and not dependent on the gravitational acceleration to move downwards. This should also make it possible to increase the speed.

It’s cool and it reminded me of something from a few years back: What about that dot matrix printer made with an RC car? I heard that the same fellows were working on a van…

FYI: I used a crane that worked on a similar principal to the rig holding the print head that used two winch lines each run through a block on its own spar that came together at a hook. It was called a Burton.